Pallava Dynasty - Languages Used

Languages Used

All the early Pallava royal inscriptions are either in Prakrit or in Sanskrit language, considered the official languages of the dynasty while the official script was Pallava grantha. Similarly, inscriptions found in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka State are in Prakrit and not in Telugu or Kannada. The phenomenon of using Prakrit and Sanskrit as official languages in which rulers left their inscriptions and epigraphies continued till 6th century CE. It would have been in the interest of the ruling elite to protect their privileges by perpetuating their hegemony of Prakrit in order to exclude the common people from sharing power (Mahadevan 1995a: 173-188). The Pallavas in their Tamil country also adopted the same method. They used Sanskrit language and Pallava grantha scripts in their official orders.

The earliest copper-plate muniment (legal document) so far discovered in India, is by the Pallavas at an early undated time. This document was the renewal of a previous grant of a garden made by an earlier king Bappa, to twenty Brahman families of the Atreya, Harita, Bhradvaja, Kausika, Kasyapa, and Vatsya gotras, who were settled in Southern India around the date of this grant. The grant mentions certain specified shares for the Brahmans, and free from all taxes ; to which was now added a new grant of a piece of land in a neighbouring village for a threshing-floor, and of another piece for house-sites, together also with four cultivating labourers, and two other agricultural serfs attached to the soil. This endowment was created for the increase of the merit, longevity, power, and fame of the donor's family and race.

The grant was issued from Kanchipura, and it was dated on the fifth day of the sixth fortnight of the rainy season in the eight year of the donor's reign. The grant was made by the Pallava king Sivaskanda-varman, who is mentioned as a member of the spiritual guild of rishi Bharadvaja, and an offerer of the Agnishtoma, Vajapeya, and Asvamedha vedic sacrifices.

The entire body of the inscription is in an old form of Prakrit; but a short benediction in Sanskrit is added at its close, with the king's name on the seal in its Sanskrit form. With regard to the date of the grant, Professor Buhler remarks that "it is impossible to say how the donor is connected with the other Pallava kings known from the sasanas as yet published, or to fix the period when he reigned", but he derives an argument for a tentative early date from the circumstance of its being written in Prakrit.

Assuming the correctness of the identification of the Pallavas with the pauranic Pahlavas, and of the Pahlavas with the Parthians, there are good historical grounds for supposing that Parthian colonies established themselves in the Deccan at a very early period. From the time of the separation of Bactria from Syria in the middle of the 3rd century BCE, the tendency of the Bactrians, forced by the pressure of their western and northern neighbours, was to extend themselves southwards into India. The Parthians, after their conquest of the Bactrians about a century later, followed up their successes by overrunning the Indian provinces of Bactria. The natural effect of this latter movement was to press the conquered Indo-Bactrians still further southwards and eastwards into India, with the concurrent tendency on the side of the Parthians always to follow up the retreat of their vanquished foes. After another interval, the Indo-Parthians were themselves forced out of their possessions in Afghanistan, Punjab, and Upper India by the Scythian invasion, and their only possible refuge then was in the south.

Foulkes says in the article "The Early Pallavas of Kánchípura" published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland as follows:

We can follow the footsteps of the refugees, by means of the inscriptions of the Kshatrapas, as far as the upper basin of the Godavari and the northern coast of the Konkans ; and when these substantial materials fail us in tracing their further progress southwards, the very natural conjecture arises that some one of the more enterprising of the defeated Parthian generals would adventure at the head of his remaining troops into the wide plains of the Dakhan (deccan) and carve out for himself a kingdom there, or, perhaps, enter into the service of the existing rulers of the Dakhan as an auxiliary defensive ally, having some frontier province committed to him for the payment of his troops, and with the ultimate inevitable result of establishing his own independent rule there. At this point of our tentative theory we are met by the Ceylonese records showing the great growth of the power of these Parthian colonists at a sufficiently early time, whatever dates may hereafter be attached to the early kings of Ceylon...

An outline of this kind, pending the discovery of more definite materials to fill in the details, quite consistently prepares us for the next succeeding historical appearance of the Pallavas in Sir Walter Elliot's Vengi copper plates of Vijaya Nandi-varman and the subsequent inscriptions of the Chalukyas, at whose arrival in the Dakhan they found the Pallavas in possession of its western districts, as far at the least as the vicinity of Badami in the middle basin of the Krishna, and of its eastern districts as far north at least as Rajahmahendri in the lower basin of the Godavari, and with their capital still at Kanchipura, where Sivaskanda-varman of our present grant reigned several centuries before.....I believe it to be, and his reign fell at any time about the end of the first century CE, or the beginning of the second.